http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
WHAT would you do if you found out your community of 1
million souls was being deported to Nazi death camps,
but you had a chance to save some on the condition you
did not warn the others?

That was the horrible dilemma facing Hungarian Jewish
leader Reszo Kasztner after the Nazis invaded Budapest
in 1944. Europe's last intact Jewish community was to be
the Holocaust's next victim, and murder-mastermind Adolf
Eichmann was wasting no time in packing Hungarian Jews
into cattle cars for Auschwitz.

Kasztner, a dashing journalist and Zionist leader, tried
to end all deportations by negotiating a "blood for
wares" bargain with Eichmann. The German war machine was
in trouble, and in exchange for $10 million and 10,000
trucks (for use on the Eastern front, the Nazis said),
Eichmann himself promised to halt the Hungarian killings.

Predictably, Kasztner failed to get Allied backing for
the deal. But eventually, he raised a multimillion-
dollar ransom of gold, jewelry, diamonds and cash that
bought thousands of Jewish lives. Among them were 1,684
Jews who boarded a train in Budapest that finally
reached the safety of Switzerland. Kasztner chose those
who made it to freedom.

To those he saved and their descendants, Kasztner became
a hero, a Jewish Oskar Schindler who made a difficult
but responsible moral choice. To others, especially
those whose families he chose not to save, Kasztner
became a villain, a man who played G-d and consorted
with the devil.

Accused after the war of being a collaborator by another
Hungarian Jew, he was the center of a tendentious
Israeli libel trial during the early 1950s and
eventually was assassinated in Tel Aviv by men convinced
he had betrayed his own people.

But had he? For almost 50 years, there has been little
or no discussion of Kasztner. While Schindler, Swedish
diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and others became icons of
righteousness for their role in saving Jewish lives,
Kasztner was almost a taboo subject. Holocaust museums
paid scant if any attention to him. In "The Final Days,"
Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning documentary
about the Hungarian Holocaust, there is no mention of
Kasztner.

That's about to change. Urged on by several New Yorkers ---
notably Vera and Imre Hecht (as a teenager, Vera was on
the Kasztner train to freedom) --- the Museum of Jewish
Heritage at Battery Park is holding a symposium on
Kasztner on tomorrow from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. It's
titled "Uncertain Redemption" and will be open to the
public.

The debate, which promises to be heated, includes
Hungarian Holocaust survivors and several experts on
Kasztner --- among them City University Prof. Egon Mayer,
whose father and mother (who was pregnant with him) also
were aboard Kasztner's train.

The new and well-deserved interest in the Kasztner story
doesn't end there. Award-winning producer Gaylen Ross
and her French colleague Anne Feinsilber are preparing a
documentary film on Kasztner and his moral dilemma. They
have found hundreds of survivors and descendants of
those he saved but are looking for more. Their e-mail
address: gaylenr@compuserve.com.

History sometimes takes time to surface --- but it always
does. So what would you have
done?